Posts tagged with Responsive Design

With over 60% of the UK owning a smartphone and just under a fifth of the population owning tablets, it’s vital that businesses and brands are thinking about the different types of device their websites are being viewed on, and also what situations the users are in when viewing websites.

Responsive design is often touted as the future of web design based on little more than a vague sense that it makes websites more user-friendly and looks very cool.

And I’ll admit that one of my favourite things about it is watching how the content shifts around when you resize your desktop browser.

But responsive design isn’t just there to entertain simple minds. Aside from the SEO benefits, case studies are starting emerge that prove the technology can also increase traffic, sales and conversions.

These five case studies from brands such as O'Neill and Time Magazine reveal the potential benefits from adopting responsive design.

Responsive design is widely considered to be the future of web design as it allows site owners to adopt a user-centric and mobile-first approach.

In a nutshell, responsive design allows websites to work from a single set of code that resizes itself to fit whatever screen a particular visitor is using, thereby negating the need for a separate mobile site.

Responsive design is a hot topic in web design at the moment, as it allows site owners to tailor content to any sized screen from a single set of code - which is obviously very useful as the mobile web continues to grow in popularity.

This is particularly true among the top retailers that tend cling to their existing mobile sites and apps rather than going responsive.

Though responsive design is an all-encompassing way of building your site rather than a mobile strategy per se, for the purposes of this post I thought it would be interesting to look at which of the top 20 UK retailers use responsive design compared to those who have a separate mobile site.

Responsive design is just one of a number of options available for businesses currently devising a mobile strategy, however it is seen by many to be the only sensible long-term option.

For the uninitiated, responsive design allows websites to work from a single set of code that resizes itself to fit whatever screen a particular visitor is using, thereby negating the need for a separate mobile site.

With publishers serving more and more of their audience through mobile and tablet devices, it's no surprise that responsive designs are growing in popularity.

From the BBC and Guardian to Metro and Express & Star, the number of publishers jumping on the responsive design bandwagon is growing rapidly and for good reason: there's a lot to like about responsive design and done right, it's pretty compelling.

Thanks in large part to the popularity of the open-source model, companies of all shapes and sizes have access to technologies that would have cost six and seven figures to develop in-house a half a decade ago.

From high-performance data stores to countless software libraries, there are plenty of open-source technologies that make building a sophisticated web-based service far less costly and time-consuming than it would have been.

Metro has become the latest newspaper to embrace responsive design as it moves towards a “mobile-first” strategy.

A blog post announcing the site redesign says that the company made the change “sure in the knowledge that mobile users are making up an increasing proportion of our visitors – and will soon be in the majority.”